Build-scripting
20 Jan, 2004
Martin Fowler writes about build languages:
... more complex builds require conditional logic, and that requires more general programming language constructs - and that's where ant/make fall down.
Absolutely. I touched on this in a previous posting on Pynt.
Pynt seems to have died, by the way; perhaps they realised that leveraging a real, existing scripting language was a better idea. Like Ruby, for example.
Fowler has been playing with Rake, a Ruby-based build scripting framework. The nice thing about Rake is that you can fall back on the full OO-scripting power of Ruby when things get complex.
Jon Tirsen has developed similar capabilities in his Ruby-based build system, which he describes in "Using Ruby to build Java systems". His "Ant-server" is an nice idea, and could allow scripting of Ant using arbitrary languages.
In the meantime, Ant-1.6 has gone some way to addressing the need with it's macrodef task. But this is still not as usable as a real scripting language, IMHO.
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